India has arrived on the global stage, celebrated for its fastest-growing economy, educated professional class, urban-based prosperity, and Bollywood-fueled cultural influence abroad. However, while some parts of the country bask in newfound affluence, others continue to toil in abject poverty. This other side of India is also plagued by violence and unrest, which increasingly targets the government. Although there is some disagreement over whether it is possible to categorize security threats as
Udayan to become a Naxalite revolutionary as well as helping to drive the wedge between Bela and her father and providing Gauri with the means to stage her own devastatingly quiet rebellion. Although there are emotional and personal reasons that these characters experience the world the way that they do, the overarching theme from the 1940s to the 1990s is that of inequality and injustice in both India and America, as seen in large-scale political movements like the Naxalites as well as smaller
Transgression of 'Love Laws' in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things: National and Personal Histories Caught in Transition In attempting to define the history and modern identity of postcolonial nations, Partha Chatterjee calls to attention the many paradoxes inherent in the cultural fabric of India. It is a country, he notes, with a modern culture based on native tradition that has been influenced by its colonial period. This modern culture contains conflicts and contradictions that create the
Mahasweta Devi is a very well known figure in modern contemporary Bengali Literature and also a Ramon Magsaysay Award winner for her tremendous works in the field of literature mainly on tribals and marginalized people. Gayatri Spivak played a great role in making Mahasweta Devi known to the literature world through her translations and her work of subaltern studies on Devi’s texts. Spivak has translated many texts of Mahasweta Devi from Bengali into English. Translation has its own problems and
Introduction: “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance,” transcribed George Bernard Shaw in Immaturity. ‘The Lowlands’ portrays the life of two siblings, born 15 months apart, in the late 1950’s themed land called Calcutta. Jhumpa Lahiri excerpts the book’s title from the section of the city called Tollygunder. During every north-eastern monsoon, the lowland fills with water reaching the height of a bicycle, which remained for the rest of the year. Udayan and
“The theatre space is a product of the interplay between stage space, gestural space and dramatic space and, according to Anne Uberseld, it is constructed, on the basis of an architecture, a (pictorial) view of the world, or a space sculpted essentially by the actors' bodies.” – Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, “Understanding Theatre Space”, 2002. Theatre, as we know it, is a microcosm of the real world that we encounter in our day to day lives. Aristotle had believed that theatre could be used as a medium
Indian women writers A world of words, lost and found: a brief overview of women's literature in India from the 6th century BC onwards The Vedas cry aloud, the Puranas shout; "No good may come to a woman." I was born with a woman's body How am I to attain truth? "They are foolish, seductive, deceptive - Any connection with a woman is disastrous." Bahina says, "If a woman's body is so harmful, How in the world will I reach truth?" Much of the world's literature has been dominated by
“It is widely admitted that the literature of any given period on the one hand and the social, economic, and political forces of that period on the other are in some important way interconnected” ( Witte). The idea that literature reflects society is at least as old as Plato's concept of imitation. In the history of ideas, it is an observation of old provenance that the arts in general, and literature in particular, have increasingly proffered a "secular spirituality" in the aftermath of the Enlightenment
Over the past 64 years of the Indian republic, the nation has witnessed many strange events. Ranging from the Legislature vs Judiciary debate of the 1970s to the secessionist movements in the North-east, challenges to the functioning of world’s largest democracy have been myriad. Emergencies form a significant part of it. Apart from the infamous proclamation of National Emergency of 1975, there are also numerous occasions when the misuse of State Emergency has been done. The emergency provisions
V. S. Naipaul, the mouthpiece of displacement and rootlessness is one of the most significant contemporary English Novelists. Of Indian descent, born in Trinidad, and educated in England, Naipaul has been placed as a rootless nomad in the cultural world, always on a voyage to find his identity. The expatriate sensibility of Naipaul haunts him throughout his fiction and other works, he becomes spokesman of emigrants. He delineates the Indian immigrant’s dilemma, his problems and plights in a fast-changing
From the onset of the twentieth century there has been an ongoing debate on context and text. Literary theorists all over the world propounded many theories that either divorced the two or made their bond stronger. From the 1920s there came a wave of critical theories, the New Critics pleaded for critical monism. The New Criticism took the poem as a work of art, a structure having an independent existence. They completely divorced the work of art from the biographical, sociological context; removed